Oracle Blog

A thin thinker down under

Thursday Feb 03, 2011

You have installed a fantastic VDI setup on a single server and you are eager to test it.... But boy, all that work of putting together a Domain Controller is just too much - you don't have a Windows 2003/2008 server CD, nor the license, so you take the quick way out, cheat death and install OpenDS using QuickSetup.

Next, you import that good old Windows 7 VM you have been using on your laptop and enable it through VDI by using a Generic Desktop provider, and of course, as you don't have a Domain Controller, you manually make it work by having the same login and password on the VM and in OpenDS, great too, all works.

But eventually, you realise that you really want to clone VMs and test fastprep and get other users to test all this, and your OpenDS strategy starts looking not so good so you rack up the nerve to put it all together and install your Domain Controller and move your VDI install away from OpenDS. All good too, except you now find that through the domain, you can no longer login with your old user into your good old Windows 7 VM, because, well, Windows considers the local user and the domain user, different ones. So how do promote that local profile for your user to a Domain profile and live happily ever after?

I spent a fair bit of time doing research on the web to find the easiest solution, one out of Microsoft, if possible. I got close when I learned about Windows Management Instrumentation - User Profiles provider. But I failed at finding clear instructions for Windows 7, and then, I found MOVEUSER.